30 April 2010

Shoppy Bike - Italian Bicycle Style and Design

It's called Shoppy Bike, a revolutionary and exclusive unisex city bike that combines innovation, functionality and style. It's on the market shortly.

Manufactured in the heart of Tuscany by Officine Meccaniche Sereni, Shoppy Bike is a high-tech bicycle made entirely in aluminium and with toothed belt drive. With its sleek design and avant-guarde mechanism, Shoppy Bike is a comfortable and elegant means of transport, the perfect way to tackle the daily hectic city traffic in style and to enjoy slow-paced moments of relaxation.

Shoppy Bike offers a colour range that goes from classic red and black to the more trendy shades of lilac and green.

Hulk* Angry! Hulk* Smash!Rargh! No like belt drive! No like small front wheel (that will handle uneveness slightly worse than a larger wheel, and which does not even have oversize tyres to make up for the fact).Hulk* hates oversize steering column that adds extra inertia to steering components, making this bicycle harder to turn than a semitruck without powersteering. Grah!(*not really Hulk)

Can't help but calling this 'Chic-washing', as it lacks the main ingredients for normal urban transportation.

Fenders for those rainy days? How hard can it be to draw those up? I think it would even enhance the design.

The girl in the pic may settle with carrying around her Gucci bag on her shoulder, but most of us need more to transport groceries and what not. That practicality is lost on this design. If so, it will be an ugly after thought.

And dammit, so much leg room in front, but no way of or room for riding around my girl on the back, side saddle chicness?

Maybe they get it right in the next decade. Funny how many of these 'new' designs strip off the very things that makes cycling appealing.

Sure it's not a Japanese enterprise? reads like Japlish to me. What a lame ad, the model's wearing such awful dated looking and trashy clothes that clash with the bike's colour and lines. And where's the shoppy basket?

Looks to me like a rip-off of the venerable Varna from Vancouver, Canada. Yes - tough crowd - we live in cities where you can buy Pashley and Biomega, and Abici, and Gazelle, and Sogreni, and Azor, and the like. I would take a Bakfiets.nl bike over this in a heartbeat.

The bike doesn't match her style at all! And Marc has it right - how it is a "shoppy" bike if you can't carry anything? Do you have a domestique driving your purchases around behind you?

I stand by my retrogrouchiness. The design of the classic utility bike has been refined for generations. It's gonna take a hell of a lot more than a flimsy green monster to shift that paradigm. If I wanted to see misguided, impractical riffs on bike design, I'd read bicycledesign.net (which I do, for the comedy value of hubless wheels), not Cycle Chic!

This is why the English speaking world dont cycle, too many people who dont ride bikes design and sell bikes. A shopping bike without a basket or fenders. No chain case so those pretty shoes will get ruined in the end.This looks as if the designer never went in to town on a bike to get a few things.